Hello everyone! This is another one of my season 7 fanfic, that I wrote after episode 708. I left the original note I had written back when I posted it on AO3:

I came up with this idea out of the blue, and since it was one of my friends' birthday two days ago (hey-lo Nick!), I figured I could write this little thing for him. I'm obviously late, and I'm so sorry about that, but I hope you'll still like it!

This is a coda, because I thought Sousa might want to talk to Simmons a little bit more after the conversation they'd had in episode 08. I hope you'll like it! Title is from "ophelia" by the lumineers. years of writing fanfictions, and I still don't know how to find proper titles.

once again, english isn't my first language and all grammar errors are mine. Sorry about that! xx

Daniel Sousa was a man out of time —an irony, really, to be called this way— but he was pretty proud to say that keeping himself up to date wasn't that hard for him. Traveling through the future (which was the past for the rest of the SHIELD team, how weird was his life now?) had taught him a few things, and the most interesting thing for him was still to see the way Women's rights had evolved. Peggy would have been so proud to see the women of the team evolve around the men without any distinctions whatsoever created by their sex, and he had to say his heart swelled every time he laid eyes on such a sight. Daniel liked the team. It was a challenge, to find himself pulled out of his life after learning that he'd became a legend after being killed by Hydra of all things, but he was happy to be there. Catching up on the situation hadn't been easy, especially since the team seemed to tiptoe around certain members, and they kept discovering things randomly as they went. Which was why Daniel found himself snapping at Jemma Simmons several times in a week, before apologizing profusely when she presented him with a new prosthetics leg. He wasn't the kind of man to lose his temper, especially with women, but he had been faced with a lot in the last couple of weeks. When it wasn't an excuse, it also was a little overwhelming, and he'd felt better after talking it through with her.

Jemma Simmons was the last remaining mystery of the team for Daniel. He'd quickly understood thanks to Daisy how the team worked —from Mack being the Director because Coulson was a highly advanced robot after dying a year back, to the many of the team members having superpowers without forgetting about Enoch being a Chronicom himself— but Jemma Simmons seemed to be a mystery he couldn't solve. From what Daniel had gathered, Simmons had been the one to save them all back at a temple where they fought an alien invasion before they jumped through time, but no one really knew much more. When Simmons had obviously been a part of the team for a very long time, as Daisy called her the sister she never had and everyone trusted her blindly, Daniel couldn't help but notice the rift that her absence had created with the team. Daisy had vaguely told him that a long time had passed for Simmons before she rescued them at the temple, even if no one really knew how long precisely except perhaps for Enoch, and Daniel found himself curious regarding this quite small but strong and mysterious woman. And of all the things that caught his gaze when it came to her —from the way her accent was slightly different than Peggy's, and the way she never seemed to smile contrary to everything Daisy told him about her adventures with Jemma back on the "bus", whatever that meant— he was regularly drawn to the wedding ring on her finger, ring that she often twisted with her other hand when she seemed nervous or got that familiar distant look in her eyes.

Which was why Daniel stopped abruptly as he walked inside the lab of the Zephyr to get himself used to his new leg, as he stumbled upon Simmons sitting at her work station all by herself. She was hunched over her computer screen, and from where he stood Daniel couldn't see her face but got a perfect glimpse of what she was looking at. It was a photo, because Daniel recognized the quality of the shots Daisy had shown him on her phone back before they'd been kidnapped by Nathaniel Malick. The man he could see on the picture looked unfamiliar to him, but he had a kindness in his eyes that Daniel noted instantly. He looked young, but so did the Simmons standing next to him with a wide smile he'd never seen on her face since he'd arrived on the Zephyr. The two were looking at each other as someone else had taken the picture, and Daniel felt weirdly invasive as he stared at it. There was so much love between the two that it was almost palpable, and from the corner of his eyes he could see Simmons' hand move to her wedding ring to worry it between her digits.

"Is he your husband?" Daniel felt himself asking, biting the inside of his lip when Simmons flinched, turning around with a gasp.

Her shoulders seemed to shag once she realized who stood behind her, and her lips turned up in a small sad smile. "Yeah" she whispered, turning her gaze to the screen again, "that's Fitz."

Fitz. He'd heard the name whispered by Daisy or even May as they looked at Jemma from the corner of their eyes, worry creasing their eyebrows. He'd wondered who he was, never really finding the courage to ask someone as they'd travelled through time to save the Earth, but it all made sense now that he looked at the picture in front of him. Simmons' eyes never left the screen, and Daniel shifted from one leg to the other, more out of habit than discomfort. The prosthetic was amazing, and he barely felt it, so used to the ugly wooden ones that made his long healed injury feel like it was on fire.

"He's the one who installed the time drive" Simmons kept going after a little while. "Well, we did, technically. The both of us, together."

Daniel hadn't really understood exactly when the team was coming from, but he knew enough to know that Simmons and her husband, Fitz, had been separated from the rest of the team. No one really knew for how long, but judging by her longing voice, he could bet it was a lot.

"Just the two of you?" he asked, trying very hard not to sound too pushy.

Simmons nodded. "With Enoch, too. We were alone all together for a while, before finding the team."

Daniel was intelligent enough to know that her response didn't call for him to push, so he simply nodded. "Hum. So, Fitz couldn't make the trip? He's not SHIELD?" he asked out of pure curiosity.

"Oh, he is. SHIELD, I mean. He's just… safe for now" Simmons replied with a sad smile. "We realized that the only way to save the world, and follow the Chronicoms in time was if we got separated, for God knows how long. Fitz is…" she frowned, as if she was looking for answers herself for a little while. "I don't precisely know where he is. The only thing I know for sure is that the only way for the Zephyr to follow the time jumps was for Fitz to stay behind."

Daniel hummed. "It must have been hard, leaving him behind" he said, thinking about a certain someone he'd left behind himself.

"It's never easy, isn't it?" Simmons replied with a sad smile. "But it's our job."

"Did you ever think about quitting?"

She seemed taken aback for a moment, and Daniel wondered if he'd pushed too far. But her eyes quickly found focus again, and she shook her head. "Thought about it more than I can count" she confessed, "but we had to save our family, and the world. Afterwards, though… we promised ourselves we'd leave SHIELD. Get a place together, raise our children there, maybe get a dog or an old cat that would roll onto our laps as we read scientific articles. Live a boring, normal life, something that we never had the chance to do before."

Daniel got it. He'd never thought, before the war, that he'd hope for a normal and boring life as Simmons put it. But so much happened, and he left a physical as well as metaphorical part of himself back on the battlefield. When he came home to New York, found his job at the SSR, he thought he had everything planned and a perfect opportunity to be happy. But it wasn't until Peggy that he'd realized his mistake. And when the ache in his chest when he thought about her was a little less painful than it had been a few months ago, it was still present, and he couldn't blame Simmons for wanting the same for her family.

"I get it" he finally said, smiling back at her. He'd truly misjudged her when he first met her, and like the rest of the team, he was happy to get to know her a little bit better. "I do. I hope you'll reunite with him soon."

Simmons' face seemed to change entirely as she smiled, throwing a longing glance at the picture. "I hope so, too. I really miss him."

"How long have you been together?" Daniel asked, feeling bold enough to push. His entire life had been shaken inside out, and the members of the team were the only friends and family he had left now. As rude as it might have been to ask, he was pretty curious to know a lot more about them.

"Oh, we met when we were 16, at the Academy" Jemma said, turning around so that she faced her computer again. Daniel took this as an invite to come closer as she closed the picture and scrolled down hundreds of smaller ones in a file that was named "FS". She opened another one, and Daniel immediately recognized the two people standing side by side on the picture. There was no mistaking Jemma's smile and kind eyes, and Fitz's piercing blue ones. The man looked much younger though, with blond curls and a frown, and Daniel felt himself smile. "We were the top two students at the Academy" Simmons said proudly. "Graduated with honors, and by the age we were 17 we had three PhDs between the two of us. We got into Sci-Ops not long after, and we joined Coulson's team at 25."

"Have you been together the whole time?"

Simmons laughed. "Oh, no. We got together much later, after Fitz confessed his feelings for me when we were stranded at the bottom of the ocean in a containment pod."

He must have looked at her with confusion, because she frowned. "We discovered that HYDRA was hiding within SHIELD back in 2014. When that got exposed, a member of our team turned out to be HYDRA and locked us both in a containment pod, that he dropped into the ocean. Fitz sacrificed himself for me there, giving me his last breath of oxygen before bursting the pod open. I managed to swim us both back up, but… he sustained a consequent brain injury, and it was hard for him for a little while."

The pain in her voice was unmistakable, and Daniel suddenly felt the need to reach out to her. Tentatively, he put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, which earned him a small smile.

"It took us a consequent amount of months to talk about what he'd told me in the pod after that, if you can believe it."

He totally could. There was no way such a trauma didn't impact both their lives and their relationship.

"But Fitz got better. He started talking a little better, and managed to get his injured hand to work. But of course, nothing's ever simple with SHIELD. I was taken by a Monolith-"

"A Monolith?"

Simmons frowned. "It's like… a giant rock. A space rock, that sends you through time or space, depending on the one you're using."

"This is confusing" Daniel admitted.

Simmons huffed. "You tell me. I was stranded on a desert planet for six months before Fitz rescued me. And then HYDRA turned out to be behind all of this, as if it was even slightly surprising, and we had to fight an inhuman that wanted to enslave the entire planet. Me and Fitz got together then, in the middle of this entire mess."

If Daniel hadn't witnessed the things he'd seen in the last couple of weeks following his arrival in the SHIELD team, he probably wouldn't have believed a word coming from Simmons' mouth. But he figured that nothing was impossible anymore, at this point.

"And did you beat him?" he asked. "The inhuman, I mean."

"Yeah, we did." Jemma's smile fell. "Daisy… Lincoln, Daisy's boyfriend, sacrificed himself for all of us."

Daniel thought he'd recognized the haunted look he could see in Daisy's eyes sometimes, and this revelation explained a lot. "I see" he said carefully.

"It was a lot for all of us to take in." Simmons kept going. "Daisy left the team for a while. Me and Fitz, we advanced in our relationship not knowing if one day, this situation could happen to the both of us. It was hard, but we made it work."

Daniel nodded. "And now Daisy's back, and you and Fitz are married."

Simmons laughed. "Yeah, well. It took a little more adventures, but here we are. Saving the world one more time."

She fell silent, her eyes cast on the screen in front of her.

"I know we're doing the right thing" she whispered, "but sometimes I wonder if it's all worth it. And feeling this hopeless, being incapable of knowing where he is and if I can contact him… I never want to feel this in my life again."

And Daniel got it. Jemma Simmons had been a mystery from the moment he'd stepped onto the Zephyr, but he somehow felt like he'd gotten to understand her a little better as she showed him a few more pictures, lips stretched into a tender smile and fingers occasionally grazing the screen in front of her to caress her husband's face. After a little while, as he excused himself and turned away to join the rest of the team, he heard Simmons call him before he slid through the doors of the lab.

"By the way" she said with a little smile. "The shirt you're wearing? It's Fitz's. I packed a few things of his before leaving to get the team, just in case. Never thought I'd need it before he'd be back, but I'm glad I did."

As he walked out and looked down at the shirt he was wearing, Daniel Sousa felt himself a grow slightly impatient himself at the idea of meeting this man he'd heard about frequently on the Zephyr since his arrival. But for now, all they could do was wait.